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Obamacare Is Good Enough for Government Work

By RICH LOWRY

December 04, 2013

As a pitchman, the president has advantages no others can match. He can engage in shamelessly false advertising without having to worry about the Better Business Bureau breathing down his neck. He passed a law called the “Affordable Care Act,” even though its mandates and regulations inevitably make health insurance more expensive.

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Obama also doesn’t have to worry too much about whether the product is truly good or not. He can fall back on government power. Individuals are having their insurance policies canceled by force of law, whether they are satisfied with them or not. Then they have to buy Obamacare-compliant policies or face a fine. This isn’t competition in the marketplace. It’s coercion.

That is the ultimate backstop for good-enough-for-government work. Government doesn’t gain or lose market share on its merits. It doesn’t go out of business. It rumbles on, no matter what, and the Obama team is relying on sheer inertia—backed by the president’s veto pen—to see them through.

They rolled out a disastrously flawed website on Oct. 1 because, hey, at least it’s a website. They touted their Nov. 30 fixes as a success because, hey, at least there were some fixes. They will tout whatever sign-up numbers they get—no matter how far short of their goals, or even if the law has rendered more people newly uninsured than it has enrolled—because, hey, at least they are sign-ups.

The president portrays himself as the picture of flexibility in considering improvements to the law, but he opposes changes passed by Congress on principle and is willing only to improvise by executive fiat. The latest on-the-fly change is a scheme to pay insurers estimated subsidies because the website can’t yet calculate them accurately.

“Short-term fix eyed for another problem with U.S. healthcare website,” is how the Reuters headline put it. Good enough for government work.